After discovering CodeIgniter, I really wanted to try it out by building a web app, but I lacked any ideas. I know you’re wondering how that’s possible. Despite my overall genius, sometimes it happens. Actually, it probably happens more often than not, but anyway, I set out on a quest to think of the next best web app.

My initial idea was a grand one! Make something that changes as more people sign up with it. That’s as far as I got though. This would probably work with a visual representation, like a world or something, that grew as more people signed up. But it isn’t really useful. Another, probably less practical implementation of this idea involves added more functionality to a web app depending on the user base. Ideally, it would be automated. I just haven’t figured out what that web app might do. Then I thought it could be something like Scratch, the programming language that’s like building with Legos, and each person that joined could place one piece. But still, I didn’t know what it should do. How could it be useful? This is where that idea ended.

My next idea rose from looking at a bunch of showcase/rating websites. That looked pretty simple, so I tried to think of what hasn’t been rated yet. And you know what I came up with? People! There’s no people rater yet! The closest thing is Hot or Not, but my version would judge people as a person. For example, George W. would get a pretty low score I’m sure, not because he looks like a monkey, but because of his warmongering and such. Now I’m not sure if certain celebrities or otherwise famous people would feel compelled to sue if they had a low score, so maybe it would be safest to stay away from that idea unless I had a lot of money and a team of lawyers.

My most recent idea came about with the intention of using something I already have and making it better: a guestbook api. That’s right. Just copy and paste some JavaScript into your page and you’ve got JibberBook without the need of a server that supports PHP! I’m not quite sure how to pull that off, but this idea seems the most solid compared to the others. Just look at the crap that free guestbooks are now. It shouldn’t be too hard to make something better. But then I was thinking, Who uses guestbooks anymore? Everyone has a blog (or should because that’s a better solution in my opinion). I don’t know. Does anyone see any potential for this?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 9:10 pm and is filed under web development and tagged with api, ideas, web-app. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.